


only in the larval stages

by Helenish



Series: Here is a thing that isn't happening. [21]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M, underage mumble mumble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-20
Updated: 2011-03-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 04:06:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helenish/pseuds/Helenish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Bugs," Arthur says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	only in the larval stages

"Well, access won’t be a problem," Arthur says, in the crisp, optimistic tone he only uses when he’s anything but.

"It’s a clusterfuck," Eames says. Arthur nods.

"Teach them not to cheap out on the extraction," he says.

Heather Nelson was the lead on a team that had been very close to making a breakthrough in genetic modifications to green lacewings to substantially increase their pest control efficacy in soybean crops. This information is considerably less useful in considering future drastic price fluctuations of organic soybeans since the extraction tore a hole in her subconscious and she’s spending her days drugged to the gills in a private hospital, not likely to finish her research any time soon.

"You think we can patch her up?" Eames says. He’s wearing a scrub top over a pair of tailored trousers and holding Heather’s chart. Arthur has a stethoscope jammed in his suit pocket and a pen from a pharmaceutical company in his hand. No one takes a second look at them, hovering just inside the doorway of her room, watching her hands twitch fitfully over the coverlet.

"You took the job," Arthur says.

"Seemed interesting," Eames says. "And if the client wants to throw good money after bad, that’s hardly my problem."

"Bugs," Arthur says.

"Curious, the things people do for a living," Eames agrees.

*

Eames rented out a studio for the duration; it’s a dusty, empty, sunny box in a reclaimed pencil factory, full of artists who keep odd hours and take no notice of Arthur or Eames. On the first day, Arthur looks at the loose chairs, the long folding table slung up against the wall, and says,

"Anyone else joining?"

"Two person job," Eames says. Arthur shrugs and puts his satchel down on the table.

"All right," he says, and nothing else.

Eames prepares for the job to be an awkward mistake, but it is, instead, companionable. They work together in silence and then talk over lunches, notes strewn across the long table. They take turns going downstairs to tell the installation artists to turn their fucking stereo down. Arthur drops some sesame noodles on some medical credentials Eames is working on once, apologizes profusely, but also says, "Well, don’t work on them where I’m trying to eat, then," and that’s, at least, familiar, so Eames thinks about that and not the rest of it, the way Arthur shoots down his ideas, not impolitely, but not carefully, either, the way Arthur nearly hesitates, the first time Eames says, "here, let me," and picks up the cannula, and shakes it off so quickly, extending his arm, that Eames decides perhaps it was in his head, when he thinks of it later. The way he knows now that the Arthur who broke his heart was someone he made up when he was a child, someone he needed badly at the time, someone who’s long gone.

*

They’re expensing any operational costs directly, but in the end it ends up being easier to skip bribing the nurses and just hack her neurologist’s system to prescribe some alternative therapies. They come and go freely, although Arthur gets roped into a twenty minute discussion once at the nurse’s station about the healing benefits of crystals.

"I admire your commitment," Eames says as they’re walking to the train; there are cameras in all the parking garages and the access roads, but none behind the facility, where anyone can duck out the double doors and walk along a little path a quarter mile through the woods to a commuter rail stop. The path is beaten down a little from other commuters, but Eames and Arthur rarely meet anyone.

"Double-blind studies have confirmed that acupuncture can relieve chronic pain conditions," Arthur says reprovingly, so Eames buys him a rose quartz healing bracelet.

"Screw you," Arthur says, when he opens the box, and then he grins and says, "I told Nurse Abby you were into past life regressions."

"Fuck off," Eames says, but none of it changes the fact that they’ve been at it for two weeks and Heather’s mind is still a burnt-out hole, a deserted falling-down city that ends, abruptly, in white, dimensionless space, at the limits of the downtown.

"Great," Arthur says, the first time they go in, looking at the empty storefronts, overturned cars, a sewer grate belching grey smoke. Eames says nothing; he spent the three weeks between jobs holed up in a hotel room reading about extraction fuck-ups like this until his eyes were burning in his sockets and then going for long runs along the waterfront, asking himself why he asked Arthur to come on this job, why not something easy and flashy, why this mess of a job that will probably end in failure and make him look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He also picked up a couple times, went home with Jake, who had a sweet, gentle face and a nice body and fucked him until he was clinging to him, letting Eames kiss him as hard as he wanted, stayed the night, blew another guy in a deserted service hallway, the pounding music of the bar echoing through the walls around them, didn’t catch his name.

Arthur was visiting some friend of his in Heidelberg—you know, art museums, wienerschnitzel, he says, when Eames asks.

Arthur figures out that the downtown is Tupelo, Mississipi after the first week, and they spend their mornings watching archival video that Arthur gets from god knows where, and then go under for an hour, a twelve hour day just trying to fix what already exists—straight construction work, sometimes, building walls, unclogging sewer drains. Eames is burnt at the end of it, sitting next to Arthur on the train home in silence. Arthur looks just as tired; his eyes half-shut, leaning his head against the window.

"What did they do to her?" he says once, the second week. There are no projections in her dreams, there’s nothing. Eames shakes his head and doesn’t answer. He’s starting to take the job personally; Heather is a gentle person who loves bugs and soybeans and doesn’t deserve to be tranqued out of her mind, useless, at 37. Almost the first thing Arthur taught him was not to take jobs personally, but after the second week, Heather’s black lab, Georgie, gets upgraded to the two walk a day package at the Shady Acres Kennel.

"What?" Arthur says. "Dogs need walks."

Eames remembers Arthur—careful, analytical, patient Arthur; Arthur’s been the voice in his head for ten years and it’s saved his life more than once, and he’s not ready the first time he thinks, I want him on his knees, I want to fuck him on his hands and knees. He used to lie awake, listening to Arthur on the phone in the living room and clutching his cock, holding his hand over his mouth to stay silent so he could hear, used to put his fingers in his mouth and think about sucking Arthur off, how wet he’d make it, how long he could make it last, think about Arthur’s mouth on his, or—or Arthur opening him, how slowly he’d go, how gently, only his fingers for a long time until Eames could show him he could take it, Arthur kissing him and touching him and telling him how well he was doing, how Arthur wanted him, and even after he knew it would never happen, he let himself think about it when he jerked off so he could stop thinking about it the rest of the time. He never thought about Arthur on his knees, never once until Arthur is reading a psychopharmacology paper, flipping a mechanical pencil through his fingers, eating Cool Ranch Doritos.

"I bought those to share," Eames says.

"Uh huh," Arthur says, absently. He licks the little flecks of powder off his forefinger and thumb before hitting page-down.

Eames thinks about catching Arthur’s rolling office chair by the arm, pulling it in close, tugging Arthur out of the chair to his knees with one hand tangled in the hair at his nape, Arthur’s mouth opening under his. He thinks about Arthur shaking his head, pulling away. He thinks about regretfully agreeing that they probably shouldn’t work together again. He thinks he probably should have asked for Jake’s phone number.

*

A few projections show up at the end of the third week and the city is busy by the fourth week, crammed, but they can’t find Heather, not in the lab they built or the painstaking replica of her house, the dog park, her grandmother’s apartment, the coffee place where she buys a triple shot latte every few days and charges it on her credit card, none of the places they’ve built for her. Eames goes in as her mother (now dead), her sister (on a Peace Corps mission in Malawi) her first boyfriend, her first girlfriend. Arthur spends a lot of time at the dog park but Heather isn’t there, she’s nowhere. Arthur is bitterly silent on the walk to the train, his movements quick and angry, but Eames doesn’t offer to pack it in. He knows what Arthur will say.

*

Eames spends a couple hours in the lab as Millie Peters, one of Heather’s graduate students, monitoring the larval lacewings and feeding aphids to their adults, taking notes, and then he heads back up to the parking garage Heather used in graduate school, every day, the year she began the research project that would become her career. He’s just come out of the elevator on the third level when a car slams around the corner and jerks to a halt in front of him.

"What are you doing?" Eames says, dropping Millie. There are a couple bullet holes in the car door and the side mirror is smashed.

"Get in," Arthur says. He floors it before Eames has the door fully closed, skidding around the corner. "You’ll want this," he says, reaching behind the seat and slapping a glock into Eames’ hand, and then he guns it up three levels of a parking garage at top speed before nearly slamming head on into a black town car.

"Shit," Arthur says, his voice calm, and then he throws the car into reverse and flies backwards as a guy leans out of the passenger window of the town car and starts shooting at them.

"Shit," Eames says, hauling himself up and leaning out the window and starting to shoot. Heather’s subconscious doesn’t know anything about guns and the guys are using some sort of fictional semi-automatic that doesn’t need to be reloaded, peppering the car with holes, luckily not aiming very well. Eames hits the windshield but not the driver before his clip gives out.

"Back seat," Arthur says. The car engine is whining and it shudders as they whip backwards around the curves. There’s an AK-47 in the back seat, which helps.

"Can you keep it a little steadier," Eames says, the third time the car jerks and shudders and he misses a shot.

"This thing handles for shit," Arthur says.

"Maybe you shouldn’t have stolen an Oldsmobile, then," Eames says, finally managing to nail the driver, and then Arthur jerks the car sideways, slams the gearshift forward, and flies out of the parking garage in the right direction, doing about 50, and merges with traffic.

"Heather drives American," Arthur says. "Everything in this dream is a shitbox."

His breath is coming a little fast, but his hands are relaxed on the steering wheel. He looks sharp, dangerous, reckless and nothing like the guy who used to correct Eames’ geometry homework.

They get in a head-on collision with a cement truck some minutes after that, and are killed instantly.

Eames waits until they’re out, until they’ve stripped off their scrubs in the locker room, stopped by the nurse’s station and said hello, accepted a couple chocolate chip cookies, and are taking the shortcut back through the woods to the train, walking quickly, before he says,

"What the hell was that?"

"What?" Arthur says.

"The car," Eames says. "The parking garage."

"Just trying to see if I could get anything out of her," Arthur says, stepping around a puddle.

"That wasn’t the plan," Eames says. Arthur was supposed to be checking the buses Heather used to take to the library.

"Haven’t you noticed how fucking docile everyone is in there?" Arthur says, stopping. "We’re in there for weeks jerking around the whole landscape and she doesn’t care, she doesn’t notice—"

"So your solution is to just start shooting people—"

"She killed us," Arthur says. "She wanted us gone and she made it happen—"

"And what happens when we go in there to tomorrow and she shuts us down?" Eames says, angry now. "If you thought this wasn’t working, we could have discussed an alternate approach—"

"I made a decision—"

"You put the whole job at risk in some stupid, poorly thought out—"

"Maybe," Arthur says, "you’re just annoyed because I got more of a reaction out of her in ten minutes than we’ve managed to get with your _approach_ —"

"Maybe I don't like it when people go off book on my ops without discussing it with me," Eames snaps.

Arthur looks away, jaw clenching, and says, "All right. Won’t happen again." He jerks around and starts back up the hill. After a moment, Eames follows.

*

Arthur sits stiffly on the train, silent, cheeks a little flushed, fuckable—fuck, stop, Eames tells himself, and says,

"Look—"

"I was out of line," Arthur says.

"You weren’t wrong," Eames says carefully. "I should have—"

"I can be—impulsive," Arthur says, very evenly. "When I’m frustrated. Your work has been exemplary, and I—"

"You can be—I’m sorry, what?" Eames says. There are other people on the train, but some seats down from them and they’re talking very quietly. "You—you can be impulsive."

"Yeah," Arthur says. "I can. What happened to you with the ‘off book on my ops’—"

"You happened," Eames says. "Improvisation is just a cover for sloppiness? Don’t go in without a Plan B?"

"Oh," Arthur says. "Right. Yes. There was that."

*

Arthur’s in the studio already when Eames gets there the next morning, hunched over his laptop, drinking an enormous cup of coffee. Eames puts the bacon, egg and cheese sandwich he bought for him at the deli downstairs at his elbow and sits down and takes a bite of his own sandwich, watches Arthur’s shoulders. Arthur picks up his sandwich, turning it over in his hands.

"I’m thinking," he says. "We should go back in and construct further into her past; some of the other cases indicate that sometimes this type of displacement can be wrapped up in some childhood memory—"

"Yeah," Eames says. Arthur peels back the foil on his sandwich. "Were you up reading all night?"

"Not all night," Arthur says, taking a bite.

"Yeah, me either," Eames says. He puts a folder in Arthur’s hands, a new plan—Heather’s summer camp, the hospital where her mother went, that first time, and Arthur smiles faintly and hands over his own folder of sketches—Heather’s preschool, the swampy gulch out at the edge of her stepfather’s back yard, humming with dragonflies and mosquitos.

"Why’d you ask me on this job?" Arthur asks as Eames pages through the thin graph paper, the same brand Arthur always liked. "You probably would have been better off with a real architect."

Eames wants to say, should say, that he doesn’t go into two-person jobs with people he doesn’t trust and that’s a pretty short list these days, but what he says instead is,

"I like your style." The Arthur he remembers might have said ‘that’s a non-answer’ or ‘hilarious, what’s the real reason?’ or just leveled him with a glance until Eames felt like an idiot, but Arthur just says

"Fair enough," around a bite of egg sandwich.

"These are good plans," Eames says slowly. Arthur wipes a little melted cheese off the corner of his mouth with his thumb. "but I’m thinking—screw it, let’s shake her up a little," and watches Arthur’s face crease into an answering grin.

*

They pull up the city hall, the long parking lot out in back, the courthouse, the strip of low rent storefronts, bail bonds and hole-in-the-wall Chinese joints, they yank up most of the rest of the downtown, where Heather spend every summer with her grandmother because her mother was already sick, even back then, they rip out everything they made for her and put in a field of soybeans and then they eat burgers they buy from the McDonald’s where Heather worked in high school, sitting on the broken courthouse steps, soybeans sprouting up through the cracks.

It grows dark, a cool breeze ruffling the tops of the plants and there’s a gap in the stalks neither of them put there; it’s a maze. Eames follows the path into the dark, Arthur silent beside him, holding a flashlight. They walk for hours, maybe; their watches are gone. In the center of the maze, they find an insect—a lacewing; bigger than a basketball, humming a little, eyes black and glittering, wings sharp as a sliced door screen.

"You don’t belong here," it says.

"Neither do you," Arthur says, very softly. The lacewing’s antennae flick up, considering.

"What does your friend say?" it says.

"This isn’t much of a place to live," Eames says.

She kills them, but very gently, piercing her mandibles into their stomachs, liquifying them from the inside out. She probably eats their bodies after, but they’re awake by then.

"The digestive secretion is stored in the maxillae," Heather says next to them, sounding a little grumpy. "And only during the larval stages; she was an adult."

"Nice to meet you too," Arthur says, but he’s smiling. They get the hell out before she starts to tell them what she thinks about alternative medicine.

*

"I need a fucking beer," Eames says once they’re safely on the train.

"Yes," Arthur says, vehemently. "Please. Let’s get crunk."

"Now you’re fucking with me, right?" Eames says, and Arthur nods, leaning his head back against the seat. He looks rumpled and tired and happy.

"Just pretty wasted is good," he says.

"I’m buying," Eames says.


End file.
